it's like i've waited my whole life for this one night.

i know there was a heck of a lot of complaining going on in the past few weeks - homesickness, frustration at the repetitive nights out, frustration with my 20-hour-a-week spanish course, annoyance with the aggressive boys, etc. etc. - but with the events of the past week, my outlook has finally completely changed. 


after my trip to honduras, i am more confused than ever as to what i want to do with the rest of my life. pretty much since my junior year in high school, i have been convinced that international medicine is it. but with as little as three days in that village, everything has been flipped upside down. 


being functional with spanish, i got to spend a lot of one on one time with the honduran doctors in the clinic. one thing one of the doctors said to me has stood out to me above all else. he told me that his favorite part of becoming a doctor is being able to interact with the patients, both rich and poor, to get to touch them and get to know them and help them in a really tangible manner. he said being a doctor is like being an artist, a scientist, and one other thing that's escaping me right now, all in one. essentially, his point was that everything he loved - from real human interaction to knowing he's making a tangible impact on humanity - was attainable through his practice. 


i was both inspired by watching him and incredibly saddened. i think growing up in a developed country has left me feeling like death must be conquered at every turn. with the incredible technology and medical advances made every day, people are living longer and longer. i realized in honduras that this obsession with extending life is supremely unnatural. all these economic problems the states are facing can, in part, be directly attributed to the baby boomers who are increasingly relying on social security and medicare. it may sound barbaric but sometimes, it's just time to let go.


what we did in honduras was nothing more than a band-aid solution. through all my classes on global health/poverty, i was led to believe that big-name infectious diseases like TB and malaria are the most dire problems citizens of developing countries face. what I learned was that the three main things that affect people in the rural areas are things like dehydration that kills a lot of kids under five, malnutrition and parasites. in the cities, we find things that affect us in the States – things like depression and alcoholism.


with an incredible lack of public health education, the things that affect these people are things that doctors can't fix. ignoring the lack of access to any form of screening or testing which was the one of the biggest sources of my disillusionment as to how much of a difference a doctor can actually make in these impoverished areas, i was equally disillusioned by how little the people i interacted with knew about simple preventative care, about taking care of themselves and their families. less than a third of the people knew how to purify their water and those who did know didn't do it because they didn't really think it was that important. they failed to connect the lack of clean water with the parasites every single one of their children had. these parasites made the kids incredibly sick so they barely ever actually made it to school which embeds them even deeper into this sick cycle of poverty. without education, the kids are relegated to the same manual labor jobs as their parents and will very rarely amount to anything more. without productive citizens advancing the nation, these developing countries will never really develop and become competitive in an increasingly globalized market. 


i was left to question, then, whether my talents would be better used as a doctor (because even with all the disillusionment, the satisfaction my doctors garnered as they helped their own people in this make-shift clinic was very, very real) or as some kind of policy-maker, perhaps, helping to set up infrastructure to target the needs of these villages. that, unfortunately, is a question i still have yet to answer and my time to decide is running out fairly quickly.


which brings me back to the purpose of this post. in the past week, i've interacted with an incredible amount of argentine citizens about their lives and the problems they see in their own country. additionally, i've finally started my integrated course at the university with other argentine students. the class is entitled human rights, gender and social work. it is very much like the critical gender studies classes i've taken at ucsd and i have to admit, it's wonderful to not have to learn new material but rather learn material i already know in spanish. this way, i'm not missing vital information but i'm learning the vocabulary and a specialized outlook from a latin american/argentine point of view. in the first class, i didn't participate but rather sat back and listened to the perspectives of both my classmates and the professor. 


i've been feeling this way for quite a while but sitting in that class and just absorbing everything around me, i've started thinking that maybe i limited the options of what i can do with the rest of my life too early. one of the most influential role models in my life, my eldest cousin, told me repeatedly that if medicine is truly what i wanted to do, i would be immensely satisfied with my career choice as she is. but there was a huge possibility that i could find very many other paths that would lead me to the same amount of satisfaction.


after this class and these conversations with the locals, i'm really excited to truly start taking advantage of the opportunities available to me here. i've complained for much too long and the truth is that i'm here for the next five months so i might as well live it up to the best of my ability. i've been talking to the directors of my program a lot over the past week and they're going to put me into contact with a couple of ngo's in the city. i'm hoping to score an internship with one of them and start extending a lot more feelers into other career options. the goal is to finally commit to something by the time i come back home. i still have a ton to learn before i can do that, though, and i'm so excited to get started (: